Blasphemy is a crime that aims at God, but does its chief harm to the one that fires it off.
So I compare it to a piece of imperfect firearms to which the marksman puts his eye, and, pulling the trigger, by the rebound finds himself in the dust.
I tell you a story, Oriental and marvellous. History speaks of the richest man in all the East. He had camels, oxen, asses, sheep, and what would make any man rich even if he had nothing else—seven sons and three daughters. It was the custom of this man's children to have family reunions. One day he is at home, thinking of his darling children, who are keeping banquet at their elder brother's house. Yonder comes a messenger in hot haste, evidently, from his looks, bearing evil tidings. Recovering himself sufficiently to speak, he says: "The oxen and the asses have been captured by a foraging party of Sabeans, and all the servants are butchered except myself." Another messenger is coming. He says that the sheep and the shepherds have been struck by lightning. Another messenger is coming. He says that the Chaldeans have come and captured the camels, and killed all but himself. Another messenger, who says: "While thy sons and daughters were at the feast, a hurricane struck the corner of the tent, and they are all dead!" But his misfortunes are not yet completed. The old man is smitten with the elephantiasis, or black leprosy. Tumors from head to foot; face distorted; forehead ridged with offensive tubercles; eyelashes fall out; nostrils excoriated; voice destroyed; intolerable exhalation from the whole body; until, with none to dress his sores, he sits down in the ashes, with nothing but broken pieces of pottery to use in the surgery of his wounds. At this point, when he needed all consolation and encouragement, his wife comes to him, and says, virtually: "This is intolerable! Our property gone, our children slain, and now this loathsome, disgusting disease is upon you. Why don't you swear? Curse God and die!"
But profanity would not have removed one tumor from his agonized body; would not have brought to his door one of the captured camels; would not have restored any one of the dead children. Swearing would have made the pain more unbearable, the pauperism into which he had plunged more distressing, the bereavement more excruciating.
And yet, from the swearing and blasphemy with which our land is cursed, one would think there were some great advantage to be reaped from the practice. There is to-day in all our land no more prevalent custom, and no more God-defying abomination, than profane swearing. You can hardly walk our streets five minutes without having your ears stung and your sensibilities shocked. The drayman swearing at his horse; the tinman at his solder; the sewing-girl imprecating her tangled thread; the bricklayer cursing at his trowel; the carpenter at his plane; the sailor at the tackling; the merchant at the customer; the customer at the merchant; the printer at the miserable proofsheet; the accountant at the troublesome line of figures;—swearing in the cellar and in the loft, before the counter and behind the counter, in the shop and on the street, in low saloon and fashionable bar-room. Children swear, men swear, ladies (!) swear. Profanity from the lowest haunt calling upon the Almighty, to the fashionable "O Lord!" of the glittering drawing-room.
This whole country is blasted with the evil. Coming from the West, a gentleman sat behind two persons conversing. Profanities were so frequent in the conversation of the two persons in front, that the gentleman behind took out his pencil and paper and made a record. The profanities filled several sheets in the course of two days, at the close of which time the gentleman handed the manuscript to the persons conversing. The men said: "Is it possible that we have uttered so many profanities in the course of two days?" The gentleman said: "Yes."—"Then," said one of the men, "I shall never swear again."
I make no abstract discussion. I hate abstractions. I had rather come right out and have a talk with you about a habit that you admit to be wrong. This habit has grown from the fact that the young often think it an evidence of manliness. There are thousands of boys and youth who indulge in it. I hear children along the street, but just able to walk, practising this iniquity. They cannot talk straight, but they get enough distinctness to let you know that they are damning their own souls and the souls of others. Oh! it is horrible to see a little child, the first time it lifts its feet to walk, set them down on the burning pavement of hell! Between sixteen and twenty years of age there is apt to come a time when a young man is as much ashamed of not being able to deliver an oath as he is of the dizziness that comes from his first cigar. He has his hat and coat and boots of the right pattern, and there is but one thing more now to bring him into fashion, and that is a capacity to swear.
So there are some of our young men surrounded by an atmosphere of profanities. Oaths sit on their lips, they roll under their tongues, and nest in the shock of hair. In elegant drawing-rooms they abstain from such utterances, but fill club-room and street with their immoralities of speech. You suggest the wrongfulness of the habit, and they thrust their finger in the sleeve of their vest, and swagger, and say: "Who cares!" They have no regard for God, but great respect for the ladies. Ah! there is no manliness in that.
The most ungentlemanly thing a man can do is to swear. This habit is becoming more and more prevalent because of the immorality of parents and employers. There are very many fathers who indulge in this habit. They feel moved to utter themselves in this way, but first look around to see if their children are present. They have no idea that their children know anything about it. The probability is that if you swear, your children swear. They were in the next room and heard you, or somebody told them about your habit. Your child is practising to do just as you do. He is laughed at, at first, for his awkwardness, but after a while he will swear as well as you.
Then look at the example of master carpenters, masons, roofers, and hatters. You know how some of you go around the building, and, when the work of your journeyman and subordinates does not please you, what do you say? It is not praying, is it? Forthwith, your journeymen and subordinates learn the habit. Hence our hat-shops, and house-scaffoldings, and side-walks, and wharves, and dockyards, and cellars, and lofts ring with blasphemies.
Men argue that, if it is right for a man worth fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to swear, it can be overlooked in men who have merely their day's wages. Because they are poor must they be denied this one luxury?
This habit becomes more prevalent because of the infirmities of temper. There are many men who, when at peace, are most fastidious of speech, but when aroused into the violence of passion, blaze with imprecation. The Oriental's wife spoken of would not have liked her husband to be profane under ordinary circumstances, but now that the camels are gone, and the sheep are gone, and the property is gone, and the boils have come, she says: "Why don't you swear? Curse God and die!" Others, all the year round, have not the froth of profanity wiped from their lips, but try to expend all the fury of a twelvemonth in one red-hot paragraph of five minutes. A man apologized for his occasional swearing by saying that, once in a year, in this way he cleared himself out. There are men who have no control of their blasphemous utterances, who want us to send them to Congress. Others have blasphemed in senatorial places, pretending afterwards that it was a mere rhetorical flourish.
Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called by-words. I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often ends in bald profanity. It is, "I declare!" "My stars!" "Mercy on me!" "Good gracious!" "By George!" "By Jove!" and "By heavens!" and no harm is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of talk to that which is positively obnoxious. The English language is magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take to ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition, and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their forked tongues,—words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored, Anglo-Saxon,—in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and Shakespeare wrote.
But whatever be the source of this habit, it is on the increase. At sixteen, boys swear with as much facility as the grandfather did at sixty. Our streets are cursed by it from end to end. Our hotels, from morning until midnight, resound with it. Men curse on the way to the bar to get their morning dram; curse the news-boy who cries the paper; curse the breakfast for being cold; curse at the bank, and curse at the store; curse on the way to bed; curse at the stone against which they strike their foot; and curse at the splinter that gets under the nail. If you do not know that this is so, it is because your ear has been hardened by the perpetual din of profanities that are enough to bring down upon any city the hurricane of fire that consumed Sodom.
The habit is creeping up into the higher circles. Every woman despises flat and unvarnished imprecations; but in the most elevated circles there are women who swear without knowing it. They have read Bulwer, and George Sand, and the exaggerated style of some of our imported as well as home-made periodical literature, until they do not actually know what is decency of speech. With fairy fan to their lips they utter their oaths, and, under chandeliers which discover not the faintest blush, recklessly speak the holiest of names. This is helped on by the second glass of wine, that is perfectly harmless; and though no one dare charge her, being so finely dressed, with anything like intoxication, yet there comes a glassiness to the eye, and a glow to the cheek, and a style of speech to the tongue that were not known before she took the second glass that was perfectly harmless.
One wild, terrific wave of blasphemy is sweeping over the land. See the effects of this widespread profanity in the increasing perjury. If men in ordinary conversation so commonly use the name of God, is it wonderful that in the jury-box, and in the alderman's office, and in the custom-house so many swear falsely? Notice the way an oath is administered. They toss the Bible at a man, and in the most trivial way say: "So help you God—kiss the book." I suppose enough lies are every day told in the custom-house to sink it. Smuggling, although it be done against positive oath, is in some circles considered a grand joke; and you say some day to your friend, "How can you sell those goods so cheaply?" and your friend says with an eye-twinkle, "The Custom-House tariff was not as high on those things as it might have been." Men more easily break their solemn oaths than formerly. What strange verdicts juries do sometimes render! What peculiar charges judges do sometimes make! What unaccountable slowness sheriffs and their deputies sometimes exhibit in the execution of their writs! What erratic railroad enterprises suddenly pass at our State capitals! What wonderful changes Congress makes in the tariff on liquors!
What is an oath? Anything solemn? Anything appealing to the Almighty? Anything stupendous in man's history? No! It is "kissing the book!" In a land where the name of God so often becomes the foot-ball of what are called respectable circles, how can we expect that it can excite any veneration when, in the presence of county clerk, or alderman, or judge, or legislative assembly, it is used in solemn adjuration? This habit lowers, bedwarfs, and destroys the entire moral nature. You might as well expect to raise harvests and vineyards on the side of belching Stromboli as to have any great excellency grow upon your soul when it so often overflows with the scoriæ of this awful propensity. You will never swear yourself up. You will swear yourself down. The Mohammedans, when they find a slip of paper they cannot read, put it aside, for fear the name of God is on it. That, you say, is one extreme. We go to the other.
You are willing to acknowledge this a miserable habit, and would like to have some recipe for its cure.
Reflect much upon the uselessness of the habit. Did a volley of oaths ever start a heavy load? Did curses ever unravel a tangled skein? Did they ever extirpate the meanness of a customer? Did they ever collect a bad debt? Did they ever cure a toothache? Did they ever stop a twinge of the gout? Did they ever save you a dollar, or put you a step forward in any great enterprise? or enable you to gain a position, or to accomplish anything that you ever wanted to do? How much did you ever make by swearing? What, in all the round of a lifetime of profanity, did you ever gain by the habit?
Reflect, also, upon the fact that it arouses God's indignation. The Bible reiterates, in paragraph after paragraph, and chapter after chapter, the fact that all swearers and blasphemers are accursed now, and are to be forever miserable. There is no iniquity that has been so often visited with the immediate curse of God.
At New Brunswick, a young man was standing on the railroad track blaspheming. The cars passed, and he was found on the track with his tongue cut out. People could not understand how, with comparatively little bruising of the rest of his body, his tongue could have been cut out. Not long ago, in Chicago, a man told a falsehood, and said that he hoped, if what he said was not true, God would strike him dead. He instantly fell. There was no longer any pulse. There was no reason for his death, except that he asked God to strike him dead, and God did it. In Scotland a club was formed, in which the members competed as to which could use the most horrid oaths. The man who succeeded best in the infamy was made president of the club. His tongue began to swell. It protruded from his mouth. He could not draw it in. He died within three days. Physicians were astounded. There was nothing like it in all the books. What was the matter with him? He cursed God, and died! Near Catskill, N.Y., during a thunder-storm, a group of men were standing in a blacksmith-shop. There came a crash of thunder, and the men were startled. One man said that he was not afraid; and he made a wager that he dared go out in front of the shop, while the lightnings were flying, and dare the Almighty. He went out; shook his fist at the heavens, crying, "Strike, if you dare!" Instantly a thunder-bolt struck him. He was dead. He cursed God, and died!
God will not abide this sin. He will not let it escape. There is a kind of manifold paper by which a man may, with a heavy pencil, write upon a dozen sheets at once—the writing going down through all the sheets. So every oath and blasphemy goes through, and is written indelibly on every leaf of God's remembrance. Ah! how much our Father bears! Can you make an estimate of how many blasphemies will roll up from the streets and saloons of our cities to-night? If you go out and look up you cannot see them. There will be no trail of fire on the sky. But the air is full of them. The name of Christ is not so often spoken in worship as in derision. God will be cursed to-night by hundreds of lips. The grog-shops will curse him. The houses of shame will curse him. Five Points will curse him. Bedford street will curse him. Chestnut street will curse him. Madison square will curse him. Beacon street will curse him. Every street in all our cities will curse him.
This blasphemy is an abomination that no words of mine can describe. And God hears it. They curse His name. They curse his Sabbath. They curse his Bible. They curse his people. They curse his Only Begotten Son. Yes; they swear by the name of Jesus! It makes my hair rise, and my flesh creep, and my blood chill, and my breath catch, and my foot halt.
Dionysius had a cave where men were incarcerated. At the top of the cave was an aperture to which he could put his ear, and could hear every sigh, every groan, every word of the inmates. This world is so arranged that all its voices go up to heaven. God puts down his ear and hears every word of praise offered, and every word of blasphemy spoken.
Our cities must come to judgment. All these oaths must be answered for. They die on the air, but they have an eternal echo. Listen for the echo. It rolls back from the ages to come. Listen:—"All blasphemers shall have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." Some have thought that a lost soul in the future world will do that which it was most prone to do in this world. If so, then think of a man blaspheming God through all eternity!
This habit grows upon a man, until at last it pushes him off forever. I saw a man die with an oath between his teeth. Voltaire rose from his dying pillow, and, supposing that he saw Christ in the room, cried out, "Crush the wretch!" A celebrated officer during the last war fell mortally wounded, and the only word he sent to his wife was: "Tell her I fought like hell!"
There are thousands of men who are having all their moral nature pulled down by the fiery fingers of this habit. At last, pinched, shrivelled, and consumed, they will get down on their beds to die, and at the step of the doctor in the hall, or the shutting of the front door, they will start up, thinking they hear the sepulchral gates creak open.
Who is this God that you should maltreat his name? Has he been haunting you, starving you, or freezing you all your life? No! He is your Father, patient and loving. He rocked your cradle with blessings, from the time you were born. He clothes you now, and always has clothed you. You never had a sickness but he was sorry for you. He has brooded over you with wings of love. He has tried to press you to his heart of kindness and compassion. He wants to forgive you. He wants to help you. He wants to make you happy. He watched last night over your pillow while you slept. He will watch to-night. He was your father's God, and your mother's. He has housed them safe from the blast, and he wants to shelter you. Do you trifle with his name? Do you smite him in the face? Do you thrust him back by your imprecations?
Who is this Jesus Christ that I hear men swearing by? Who is he? Some destroyer, that they so treat his name? What foul thing hath he done, that our great cities speak his name in thousand-voiced jeer and contempt? Who is he? A Lamb, whose blood simmered in the fires of sacrifice, to save you. A Brother, who put down his crown of glory that you might take it up. For many years he has been striving, night and day, to win your affections. There is nothing in heaven that he is not willing to give you. He came with blistered feet and streaming eyes, with aching head and broken heart to relieve you. On the craft of a doomed humanity he pushed out into the sea, to pick you off the rock. Who will ever again malign his name? Is there a hand that will ever again be lifted to wound him? If so, let that hand, blood-dipped, be lifted now. Which one of my readers will ever again utter his sacred name in imprecation? If any, now let them speak. Not one! Not one!
One summer among the New England hills there was an evening memorable for storm and darkness. The clouds, which had been all day gathering, at last unlimbered their batteries. The Housatonic, that flows in silence save as the paddles of pleasure-parties rattle in the row-lock, was lashed into foam and its waves staggered, not knowing where to lay themselves. The hills jarred at the rumbling of God's chariots. Blinding sheets of rain drove the cattle to the bars, and beat against the window-pane as if to dash it in. The corn-fields crouched in the fury, and the ripened grain-fields threw their crowns of gold at the feet of the storm-king. After the night shut in, it was a double night. Its black mantle was rent with the lightnings, and into its locks were twisted the leaves of uprooted oaks, and shreds of canvas torn from the masts of the beached shipping. It was such a night as makes you thank God for shelter, and bids you open the door to let in even the spaniel howling outside with the terror. We went to sleep under the full blast of heaven's great orchestra, and the forests with uplifted voice, in choiring hosts that filled all the side of the mountains, praising the Lord.
We waked not until the fingers of the sunny morn touched our eyelids. We looked out and. Housatonic slept as quiet as a baby's dream. Pillars of white cloud set up along the heavens looked like the castles of the blest, built for hierarchs of heaven on the beach of the azure sea. The trees sparkled as though there had been some great grief in heaven, and
each leaf had been God-appointed to catch an angel's tear. It seemed as if God our Father had looked down upon earth, his wayward child, and stooped to her tear-wet cheek, and kissed it.
Even so will the darkness of our country's crime and suffering be lifted. God will roll back the night of storm, and bring in the morning of joy. Its golden light will gild the city spire, and strike the forests of Maine, and tinge the masts of Mobile; and with one end resting upon the Atlantic beach and the other on the Pacific coast, God will spring a great rainbow arch of peace, in token of everlasting covenant that the land shall never again be deluged with crime.
There are ten thousand ways of telling a lie. A man's entire life may be a falsehood, while with his lips he may not once directly falsify. There are those who state what is positively untrue, but afterwards say, "may be," softly. These departures from the truth are called "white lies;" but there is really no such thing as a white lie. The whitest lie that was ever told was as black as perdition. No inventory of public crimes will be sufficient that omits this gigantic abomination. There are men, high in Church and State, actually useful, self-denying, and honest in many things, who, upon certain subjects, and in certain spheres, are not at all to be depended upon for veracity. Indeed, there are multitudes of men who have their notions of truthfulness so thoroughly perverted, that they do not know when they are lying. With many it is a cultivated sin; with some it seems a natural infirmity. I have known people who seemed to have been born liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave. Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared in their first utterances and was as natural to them as any of their infantile diseases, and was a sort of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this tendency has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger development. They have gone from attainment to attainment, and from class to class, until they have become regularly graduated liars.
The air of the city is filled with falsehoods. They hang pendent from the chandeliers of our finest residences; they crowd the shelves of some of our merchant princes; they fill the side-walk from curb-stone to brown-stone facing. They cluster around the mechanic's hammer, and blossom from the end of the merchant's yard-stick, and sit in the doors of churches. Some call them "fiction." Some style them "fabrication." You might say that they were subterfuge, disguise, delusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception, misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I shall chiefly call them what my father taught me to call them—lies.
I shall divide them into agricultural, mercantile, mechanical, and ecclesiastical lies; leaving those that are professional, social, and political for some other chapter.
First, then, I will speak of those that are more particularly agricultural. There is something in the perpetual presence of natural objects to make a man pure. The trees never issue "false stock." Wheat-fields are always honest. Rye and oats never move out in the night, not paying for the place they have occupied. Corn shocks never make false assignments. Mountain brooks are always "current." The gold on the grain is never counterfeit. The sunrise never flaunts in false colors. The dew sports only genuine diamonds.
Taking farmers as a class, I believe they are truthful, and fair in dealing, and kind-hearted. But the regions surrounding our cities do not always send this sort of men to our markets. Day by day there creak through our streets, and about the market-houses, farm wagons that have not an honest spoke in their wheels, or a truthful rivet from tongue to tail-board. During the last few years there have been times when domestic economy has foundered on the farmer's firkin. Neither high taxes, nor the high price of dry-goods, nor the exorbitancy of labor, could excuse much that the city has witnessed in the behavior of the yeomanry. By the quiet firesides of Westchester and Bucks counties I hope there may be seasons of deep reflection and hearty repentance.
Rural districts are accustomed to rail at great cities as given up to fraud and every form of unrighteousness; but our cities do not absorb all the abominations. Our citizens have learned the importance of not always trusting to the size and style of apples in the top of a farmer's barrel, as an indication of what may be found farther down. Many of our people are accustomed to watch to see how correctly a bushel of beets is measured; and there are not many honest milk-cans. Deceptions do not all cluster around city halls. When our cities sit down and weep over their sins, all the surrounding counties ought to come in and weep with them.
There is often hostility on the part of producers against traders, as though the man who raises the corn were necessarily more honorable than the grain dealer, who pours it into his mammoth bin. There ought to be no such hostility. The occupation of one is as necessary as that of the other. Yet producers often think it no wrong to snatch away from the trader; and they say to the bargain-maker, "You get your money easy." Do they get it easy? Let those who in the quiet field and barn get their living exchange places with those who stand to-day amid the excitements of commercial life, and see if they find it so very easy. While the farmer goes to sleep with the assurance that his corn and barley will be growing all the night, moment by moment adding to his revenue, the merchant tries to go to sleep, conscious that that moment his cargo may be broken on the rocks, or damaged by the wave that sweeps clear across the hurricane deck; or that the gold gamblers may, that very hour, be plotting some monetary revolution, or the burglars be prying open his safe, or his debtors fleeing the town, or his landlord raising the rent, or the fires kindling on the block that contains all his estate. Easy! is it? God help the merchants! It is hard to have the palms of the hand blistered with out-door work; but a more dreadful process when, through mercantile anxieties, the brain is consumed!
In the next place we notice mercantile lies, those before the counter and behind the counter. I will not attempt to specify the different forms of commercial falsehood. There are merchants who excuse themselves for deviation from truthfulness because of what they call commercial custom. In other words, the multiplication and universality of a sin turns it into a virtue. There have been large fortunes gathered where there was not one drop of unrequited toil in the wine; not one spark of bad temper flashing from the bronze bracket; not one drop of needle-woman's heart-blood in the crimson plush; while there are other great establishments in which there is not one door-knob, not one brick, not one trinket, not one thread of lace, but has upon it the mark of dishonor. What wonder if, some day, a hand of toil that had been wrung, and worn out, and blistered until the skin came off, should be placed against the elegant wall-paper, leaving its mark of blood,—four fingers and a thumb; or that, some day, walking the halls, there should be a voice accosting the occupant, saying, Six cents for making a shirt; and, flying the room, another voice should say, Twelve cents for an army blanket; and the man should try to sleep at night, but ever and anon be aroused, until, getting up on one elbow, he should shriek out, Who's there?
There are thousands of fortunes made in commercial spheres that are throughout righteous. God will let his favor rest upon every scroll, every pictured wall, every traceried window; and the joy that flashes from the lights, and showers from the music, and dances in the children's quick feet, pattering through the hall, will utter the congratulation of men and the approval of God.
A merchant can, to the last item, be thoroughly honest. There is never any need of falsehood. Yet how many will, day by day, hour by hour, utter what they know to be wrong. You say that you are selling at less than cost. If so, then it is right to say it. But did that thing cost you less than what you ask for it? If not, then you have lied. You say that article cost you twenty-five dollars. Did it? If so, then all right. If it did not, then you have lied. Suppose you are a purchaser. You are "beating down" the goods. You say that that article, for which five dollars is charged, is not worth more than four. Is it worth no more than four dollars? Then all right. If it be worth more, and, for the sake of getting it for less than its value, you wilfully depreciate it, you have lied. You may call it a sharp trade. The recording angel writes it down on the ponderous tomes of eternity—"Mr. So and So, merchant on Water street, or in Eighth street, or in State street; or Mrs. So and So, keeping house on Beacon street, or on Madison avenue, or Rittenhouse square, told one lie." You may consider it insignificant, because relating to an insignificant purchase. You would despise the man who would falsify in regard to some great matter, in which the city or the whole country was concerned; but this is only a box of buttons, or a row of pins, or a case of needles. Be not deceived. The article purchased may be so small you can put it in your vest pocket, but the sin was bigger than the Pyramids, and the echo of the dishonor will reverberate through all the mountains of eternity.
You throw out on your counter some specimens of handkerchiefs. Your customer asks, "Is that all silk? no cotton in it?" You answer, "It is all silk." Was it all silk? If so, all right. But was it partly cotton? Then you have lied. Moreover, you lost by the falsehood. The customer, though he may live at Lynn, or Doylestown, or Poughkeepsie, will find out that you defrauded him, and next spring, when he again comes shopping, he will look at your sign and say: "I will not try there. That is the place where I got that handkerchief." So that, by that one dishonest bargain, you picked your own pocket and insulted the Almighty.
Would you dare to make an estimate of how many falsehoods in trade were yesterday told by hardware men, and clothiers, and fruit-dealers, and dry-goods establishments, and importers, and jewellers, and lumbermen, and coal-merchants, and stationers, and tobacconists? Lies about saddles, about buckles, about ribbons, about carpets, about gloves, about coats, about shoes, about hats, about watches, about carriages, about books,—about everything. In the name of the Lord Almighty, I arraign commercial falsehoods as one of the greatest of abominations in city and town.
In the next place, I notice mechanical lies. There is no class of men who administer more to the welfare of the city than artisans. To their hand we must look for the building that shelters us, for the garments that clothe us, for the car that carries us. They wield a widespread influence. There is much derision of what is called "muscular Christianity;" but in the latter day of the world's prosperity, I think that the Christian will be muscular. We have the right to expect of those stalwart men of toil the highest possible integrity. Many of them answer all our expectations, and stand at the front of religious and philanthropic enterprises. But this class, like the others that I have named, has in it those who lack in the element of veracity. They cannot all be trusted. In times when the demand for labor is great, it is impossible to meet the demands of the public, or do work with that promptness and perfection that would at other times be possible. But there are mechanics whose word cannot be trusted at any time. No man has a right to promise more work than he can do. There are mechanics who say that they will come Monday, but they do not come until Wednesday. You put work in their hands that they tell you shall be completed in ten days, but it is thirty. There have been houses built of which it might be said that every nail driven, every foot of plastering put on, every yard of pipe laid, every shingle hammered, every brick mortared, could tell of falsehood connected therewith. There are men attempting to do ten or fifteen pieces of work who have not the time or strength to do more than five or six pieces; but by promises never fulfilled keep all the undertakings within their own grasp. This is what they call "nursing" the job.
How much wrong to his soul and insult to God a mechanic would save, if he promised only so much as he expected to be able to do. Society has no right to ask of you impossibilities.
You cannot always calculate correctly, and you may fail because you cannot get the help that you anticipate. But now I am speaking of the wilful making of promises that you know you cannot keep. Did you say that that shoe should be mended, that coat repaired, those brick laid, that harness sewed, that door grained, that spout fixed, or that window glazed, by Saturday, knowing that you would neither be able to do it yourself nor get any one else to do it? Then, before God and man, you are a liar. You may say that it makes no particular difference, and that if you had told the truth you would have lost the job, and that people expect to be disappointed. But that excuse will not answer. There is a voice of thunder rolling among the drills, and planes, and shoe-lasts, and shears, which says: "All liars shall have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone."
I next notice ecclesiastical lies; that is, falsehoods told for the purpose of advancing churches and sects, or for the purpose of depleting them. There is no use in asking many a Calvinist what an Arminian believes, for he will be apt to tell you that the Arminian believes that a man can convert himself; or to ask the Arminian what the Calvinist believes, for he will tell you that the Calvinist believes that God made some men just to damn them. There is no need of asking a pedo-Baptist what a Baptist believes, for he will be apt to say that the Baptist believes immersion to be positively necessary to salvation. It is almost impossible for one denomination of Christians, without prejudice or misrepresentation, to state the sentiment of an opposing sect. If a man hates Presbyterians, and you ask him what Presbyterians believe, he will tell you that they believe that there are infants in hell a span long.
It is strange also how individual churches will sometimes make misstatements about other individual churches. It is especially so in regard to falsehoods told with reference to prosperous enterprises. As long as a church is feeble, and the singing is discordant, and the minister, through the poverty of the church, must go with threadbare coat, and here and there a worshipper sits in the end of a pew having all the seat to himself, religious sympathizers of other churches will say, "What a pity!" But, let a great day of prosperity come, and even ministers of the gospel, who ought to be rejoiced at the largeness and extent of the work, denounce, and misrepresent, and falsify,—starting the suspicion, in regard to themselves, that the reason they do not like the corn is because it is not ground in their own mill.
How long before we shall learn to be fair in our religious criticisms! The keenest jealousies on earth are church jealousies. The field of Christian work is so large that there is no need that our hoe-handles hit.
May God extirpate from the world ecclesiastical lies, commercial lies, mechanical lies, and agricultural lies, and make every man, the world over, to speak truth with his neighbor!
As on some bitter cold night, while threshing our hands about to keep our thumbs from freezing, we have looked up and seen the northern lights blazing along the sky, the windows of heaven illumined at the news of some great victory, so from beyond this bitter night of abomination a brightness strikes through from the other side.
I have thought that it would be well, in these chapters on the sins of the times, to lift before you a vision of what our cities will be when the work of good men shall have been concluded and our population redeemed. I doubt not that sometimes men have shut this book, thinking that the gigantic wrongs we depict may never be discomfited. Lest you be utterly disheartened, I will show you that we fight in a war in which we will be completely victorious. This is to be no drawn battle; for, when it is done, the result will not be disputed by a man on earth, or an angel in heaven, or a devil in hell. We shall have captured every one of the strongholds of darkness. You and I will live to see the day when gambling-hells will be changed into places of Christian merchandise, and houses of sin swept and garnished for the residence of the purest home circles.
Beethoven was deaf, and could not hear the airs he composed; but when the song of universal disenthralment arises, and white Circassian stands up by the side of black Ethiopian, and tropical groves wave to the Lebanon cedars, we shall, standing somewhere, know it and see it, and hear it. If gone from earth, we will be allowed to come out on the hills and look.
We do not talk about impossibilities. We do not propose a medicine about which we have to say that it will "kill or cure." For this balm that oozes from the tree of heaven will inevitably cure.
I remark that this coming time of municipal elevation will be a time of financial prosperity. Many seem to suppose that when the world's better days come, the people will forsake their industries, and give themselves to perpetual psalm-singing, and, being all absorbed in spiritual things, will become reckless as to dress and dwelling; and very rigid laws then governing the commercial world, all enterprise and speculation will cease, and all hilarity be stricken out of the social circle. There is no warrant for such an absurd anticipation. I suppose that when society is reconstructed, where there is now, in the course of a year, one fortune made, there will be a hundred fortunes made. Every one knows that the commercial world thrives in proportion as there is confidence between man and man; and the extirpation of all double-dealing and fraud from society will increase this confidence, and hence greater prosperity. The heavy commercial disasters that have smitten this land were the work of godless speculators and infamous stock-gamblers. It is crime that is the mightiest foe to business; but when the right shall hurl back into ruin the plots of bad men, and purify the commercial code, and thunder down fraudulent establishments, and put into the hands of honest men the keys of commercial prosperity, blessed will be the bargain-makers of the city.
That will be a prosperous time, for taxes will be a mere nothing. Every style of business is taxed now to the utmost. City taxes, county taxes, State taxes, United States taxes, license taxes, manufacturing taxes, stamp taxes,—taxes! taxes! taxes! Our citizens must make a small fortune every year to meet these exactions. What hand fastens to all of our great industries this tremendous load? Crime! We have to pay the board of every man and woman who, by intemperance, is cast into the alms-house. We have to support the orphans of those who plunge themselves into their graves by beastly indulgences. We support from our pockets the large machinery of municipal government, which is vast just in proportion as the criminal proclivities of the city are great. What makes necessary hospitals, houses of refuge, police-stations, and alms-houses, the Tombs, Sing Sing, and Moyamensing?
In that good time coming there shall be no exhaustive taxation; no orphans homeless, for parents will be able to leave their children a competency; no prisons, for crime will have given place to virtue. Then the vast swindles which now, from time to time, disgrace our cities, will be unheard of. No voting of public money that, on its way to some city improvement, falls into the pockets of those who voted it. No courts of Oyer and Terminer, at vast expense to the people. No empanelling of juries to inquire into theft, arson, murder, slander, and black-mail. In that day of redemption there will be better factories, grander architecture, finer equipages, larger estates, richer opulence.
Again: when our cities are purified the churches will be multiplied, purified, and strengthened. Now, denominations, and the individuals of the different sects, are often jealous of each other. Christians are not always kindly disposed toward each other; and ministers of the gospel sometimes forget the bond of brotherhood. In that day they will be sympathetic and helpful. There may be differences of opinion and sentiment, but no acerbity, no hypercriticism, and no exclusiveness. In that day all the churches will be filled with worshippers. We have not to-day, in the cities, church-room for one-fourth of our population; and yet there is a great deal more room than the people occupy. The churches do not average an attendance of five hundred people. The vast majority do not attend public worship. But in the day of which I speak there will be enough church-room to hold all the people, and the room will be occupied. In that time what rousing songs will be sung! What earnest sermons will be preached! What fervent prayers will be offered! In these days a fashionable church is a place where, after a careful toilet, a few people come in, sit down, and what time they can get their minds off their stores, or away from the new style of hat in the seat before them, listen in silence to the minister—warranted to hit no man's sins—and to the choir, who are agreed to sing tunes that nobody knows; and, having passed away an hour in dreamy lounging, go home refreshed.
I pronounce much of what is called "church music," in our day, a mockery and a farce. Though I have neither a cultured voice nor a cultured ear, no man shall do my singing. When the storms, and the trees, and the dragons are called on to praise the Lord, I feel that I must sing, for I know more about music than do the dragons. Nothing can take the place of artistic music. The dollar that I pay to hear Parepa or Nilsson sing is far from being wasted. But, when the hymn is read, and the angels of God stoop from their thrones to bear up on their wings the praise of the great congregation, let us not drive them away with our indifference. I have preached in churches where fabulous sums of money were paid to performers, and the harmony was exquisite as any harmony that ever went up from an Academy of Music; and yet, for all the purposes of devotion, I would prefer the hearty, out-breaking song of a backwoods Methodist camp-meeting. When these fancy starveling songs get up to the gate of heaven, how do you suppose they look, standing beside the great doxologies of the glorified? Let an operatic performance, floating upward, get many hours the start, and it shall be caught and passed by the shout of the Sailors' Bethel, or the hosanna of the Sabbath-school children.
I know a church where there was no singing except that done by the choir, save one old Christian man; and they waited upon him by a committee, and asked him if he would not stop singing, for he disturbed the choir!
The day cometh when all the churches will rejoice in this department of service, rightly conducted, and when from all the great audiences of attentive worshippers will rise a multitudinous anthem.
"O God! let all the people praise thee!" Again: when the city is redeemed, the low haunts of vice and pollution will be extinguished. Mr. Etzler, of England, proposes, by the forces of tide, and wind, and wave, and sunshine, to reconstruct the world. In a book of much genius, which rushed rapidly from edition to edition, he says:—"Fellow-men: I promised to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; may level continents; sink valleys; create lakes; drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling a thousand miles in twenty-four hours; may cover the ocean with floating islands, movable in any desired direction, with an immense power and celerity, in perfect security, and with all the comforts and luxuries; bearing gardens and palaces, with thousands of families, and provided with rivulets of sweet water; may explore the interior of the globe, and travel from pole to pole in a fortnight; provide himself with means yet unheard of for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; leading a life of continual happiness, of enjoyment yet unknown; free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and, finally, render it less afflicting. From the houses to be built will be afforded the most enrapturing views to be fancied; from the galleries, from the roof, and from its turrets may be seen gardens, as far as the eye can see, full of fruits and flowers, arranged in the most beautiful order, with walks, colonnades, aqueducts, canals, ponds, plains, amphitheatres, terraces, fountains, sculptured works, pavilions, gondolas, places for public amusement, to delight the eye and fancy. All this to be done by urging the water, the wind, and the sunshine to their full development." Mr. Etzler gives plates of the machinery by which all this is to be done. He proposes the organization of a company; and says small shares of twenty dollars will be sufficient—in all from two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dollars—to create the first establishment for a whole community, of from three to four thousand individuals. "At the end of five years we shall have a principal of two hundred millions of dollars; and so paradise will be wholly regained at the end of the tenth year."
There is more reason in this than in many of the plans proposed; but mechanical forces can never recreate the world. I shall take no shares in the large company that is proposed; my faith is that Christianity will yet make the worst street of our cities better than the best street now is.
Archimedes consumed the enemies of Syracuse by a great sun-glass. As the ships came up the harbor, the sun's rays were concentrated upon them: now the sails are wings of fire; the masts fall, and the vessels sink. So, by the great sun-glass of the Gospel, the rays of heaven will be concentred upon all the filth and unchastity and crime of our great towns, and under the heat they will blaze and expire. When the day comes that I have shown will come, suppose you that there will be any midnight brawls? any shivering mendicants, kicked off from the marble steps? any droves of unwashed, uncombed, unfed children? any blasphemers in the street? any staggering past of inebriates? No! No wine-cellars. No lager-beer saloons. No distilleries where they make the XXX. No bloated cheeks. No blood-shot eyes. No fist-battered foreheads. The grandchildren of that woman who now walks up the street with a curse, as the boys stone her, will be philanthropists, and heal the sick, and manage great commercial enterprises.
When our cities are so raised, we shall have a different style of municipal government. The great question, in regard to the execution of the law, now is: "What is popular?" Our city governments slumber—great carcasses of insufficiency, sending up their stench into the nostrils of high heaven, while there are thousands of gambling-houses, and drinking-saloons, and more places of damnable lust than the decency of the country has time to count. Do you tell me that the authorities do not know it? They do know it. All the police know it. The sheriff and his deputies know it. The aldermen know it. The mayors know it. Everybody who keeps his eyes and ears open knows it. In the name of God I impeach the municipal authorities of many of our cities, that they neglect to execute the law. You cannot charge it upon any one party. Within the past few years both parties, and all kinds of parties, have been in power; but the work has never been done. You have but to pass the City Hall, or look in upon the rooms of some of our city officials, to see to what sort of men our cities have been abandoned. Look at the swearing, bloated, sensual wretches who stand on the outside of the New York City Hall, picking their teeth, waiting for some crumbs of emolument to fall at their feet; and then tell me how far it is from New York to Sodom. Who are those wretched women sent up in the city van to the police-court, apprehended for drunkenness? They will be locked up in jail; but what will be done with the groggeries that made them drunk? Who are these men in the city-prison? That man stole a pair of shoes; that boy, one dollar from the counter; that girl snatched a purse—all villanies of less than twenty or thirty dollars' damage to the community; but for that gambler, who last night took that young man's thousand dollars—nothing! For that man who broke in upon the purity of a Christian household, and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the strategy of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to the bottomless pit—nothing! For those who "fleeced" a young man, and induced him to filch from his employers vast sums of money, until, in his agony, he came to an officer of the church, and frantically asked what he should do—nothing!
Verily, small crimes ought to be punished; but it were more just if our authorities would turn out from our jails and penitentiaries the small villains, the petty criminals, the infantile offenders, the ten-dollar desperadoes, and fill their places with some of these monsters of abomination, who drive their roan span through our fine streets until honest men have to fly to escape being run over; and if they would turn out from their incarceration the poor girls of the town, and put in some of the magnificent ladies who cover up the sidewalk with their unpaid-for fineries, and with scornful look, in the church-aisle, pass the daughters of poverty, who with their faded dress and plain hat dare to come to worship God in the same sanctuary.
But all these wrongs shall be righted. Our streets shall hear the tramp of a regenerated multitude. Three hundred and sixty bells were rung in Moscow when the prince was married; but when righteousness and peace shall "kiss each other" in all the earth, ten thousand bells will strike the jubilee. Poverty enriched. Hunger fed. Disease cured. Crime purified. The cities saved.
THE END.